Gem Dust and Stardust
by Ava Blook
Summary: Steven's life in Beach City was the best he could have hoped for - until he discovered the dark secret behind it all, the one the Gems had been hiding from him his whole life. Now he and the Gems have to fight to get back to that idyllic life, and it's harder than anything they've ever done before. Warning: may change the way you see Steven Universe forever. Many OCs later on.
1. Prologue

**This is my first attempt at Steven Universe fic, so I apologize if it doesn't come across quite right just yet.**

 **Also, as a general disclaimer, this fic is based off a really weird dream I had, and the first chapter especially might be a little bit OOC. I apologize if my lack of experience in this fandom obscures the story.**

 **A huge thanks to rana2001 for beta reading this mess and helping me find a slew of typos and mistakes!**

 **Also, I don't own Steven Universe**

* * *

It was supposed to be a regular mission. Finding the Scepter of Stars, lost thousands of years ago in the Gem battlefield, was supposed to be a nice break from dealing with Peridot and Malachite and Homeworld's cluster experiments.

And at first, it was.

"The Scepter of Stars is a black staff," Pearl had explained to him, projecting out a hologram of the Scepter so Steven could get an idea of how it looked. "It has a body split into three smaller cylinders that spiral together to form a single handle, with a half-spherical geode ornament with clear crystals at the top and smaller gem fragments scattered down its handle."

"Got it!" Steven had said, and the Gems and Steven split up to search through the tangles of strawberry vines and the weapons of fallen gems.

As he searched, Steven couldn't help but marvel at the enormous strawberries that grew there. Some of them were even bigger than he was, and the smell they gave off was incredibly sweet.

The bright fruits and plants seemed at odds with the various weapons scattered around the battlefield, though. While most of the weapons were bright candy colors fitting to such a place, they were still sharp and deadly and at odds with the peaceful garden feel.

It hadn't been hard to find the mostly-black Scepter of Stars in that mess of color, though. Steven found it half-planted in the dirt, with the hollow half-geode still shining among the strawberry leaves.

He kneeled down to dig it out, carefully scraping the earth and strawberry roots off its surface.

And then, in a particularly large clump of dirt that he knocked off the Scepter, Steven saw something sparkle.

Something blue.

He gently laid the Scepter down and picked up the blue thing, brushed the dirt off of it. Its sky-blue edges and planes caught the light, and Steven could see what it was.

A gem shard.

He carefully bubbled it and turned back to the dirt he'd dug the scepter out of, looking for more.

He pawed, shifted, and clawed through the dirt right around the Scepter, and then a bit farther away, but there were no more shards anywhere around. In fact, he couldn't remember ever seeing gem shards other than this one on the battlefield.

If Gems had been shattered here like he'd been told, where had the shards gone?

Carefully, Steven grabbed the Scepter in one hand and the bubbled gem shard in the other and raced back to the point they'd all agreed to meet at.

"Guys! I found it!" he yelled, and the Gems came running.

"Steven! You really found it!" Pearl said, the excitement heavy in her voice. She gently took the offered Scepter from Steven's outstretched hand and began looking it over.

"Oh, this is perfect!" she said. "Now that we have the scepter, we'll be able to use its constellation powers to find Malachite's general location and get that whole mess worked out!"

"Nice work," said Garnet, who had come up behind Steven.

"Yeah, great job, Steven!" Amethyst said.

Garnet ruffled a hand through Steven's hair. He laughed and playfully pushed her hand away.

"Hey, be careful," he said, still laughing a bit. He held the bubbled gem shard a bit farther away from his body. "I have to keep this safe!"

In an instant, all the Gems suddenly seemed a lot less happy about his victory in finding the Scepter and a lot more worried about the gem shard he'd bubbled.

"Steven, where did you find that?" Pearl asked, her voice suddenly tight with worry, her grip on the Scepter even tighter.

"It was in the dirt around the Scepter," Steven said. "I looked around and I didn't find any more shards nearby; I don't know where the rest are."

He held out the bubble to Garnet, who took hold of it and inspected it, then held it out for Amethyst to do the same. The smaller Gem shrugged gently, and Garnet tapped on the bubble, sending it to the bubble room in the temple.

"Actually, I didn't find any other gem shards on the battlefield here. Did you guys?"

Pearl seemed to brace herself, using her grip on the Scepter of Stars to balance. When she spoke, she kept her eyes pressed closed, like she didn't want to see the effect her words would have.

"No, Steven, we didn't."

For a second, Steven thought it over.

"Then . . . what happened to the shattered gems on the battlefield?"

There was silence from the Gems.

For a second, Steven thought he must have been seeing things wrong, that the Gems must have caught sight of a Gem monster just behind Steven and not wanted to alert him. But no, even when he turned he couldn't see anything out of the usual behind him, just miles of rolling strawberry fields.

The Gems were all looking at him like he'd just died in front of him.

"Guys? What's the matter?" Steven asked, which seemed to shake Amethyst, at least, back into the present.

"It's cool, Ste-man," she said, stepping towards him and beginning to walk back towards the warp pad. "We just didn't think you'd be asking until you were a bit older."

"Amethyst!" Pearl said, darting forwards. "That's not—we weren't—"

But she couldn't seem to find the right words, which was so rare for Pearl that Steven was a bit scared. He'd just been curious; what exactly was the answer, that the Gems were so reluctant to tell him?

"I told you we should have waited," Garnet muttered. "He isn't ready yet."

"Ready for what?" Steven asked, but Garnet just brushed by him, heading back to the warp pad after Amethyst. "Garnet?"

"Don't worry about it, Steven," Pearl said, resting a hand on his shoulder. "Let's just go back to your room. That cartoon you like is coming on the TV soon, isn't it?"

Now that Pearl had mentioned it, Steven remembered that, yeah, there were supposed to be two new episodes of Crying Breakfast Friends aired today, and that he could still get the chance to watch them if they headed home now.

The warp pad activated in front of him as Garnet and Amethyst warped themselves home, and Steven couldn't help glancing nervously at the field around him, wondering what about this place, about his question, had made the Gems so anxious.

Reluctantly, he let Pearl lead him to the warp pad and warp them home, all the while looking at the land covered in strawberry plants and trying to figure out what had happened there before he'd seen it.

* * *

Back at home, it was like the incident with Sardonyx all over again, except this time, Steven was the one Garnet was shutting out. He could sometimes hear her and the other Gems arguing when they didn't know he was around, but as soon as Garnet saw him coming, she'd stop talking, even if she was in the middle of a sentence, and head into the temple.

Steven wasn't quite sure what she was mad at, this time. Most of her anger seemed to be directed at Amethyst for some reason, but she also seemed irritated that Pearl had answered Steven's question about the Gems finding other shards, and it had been Steven asking questions in the first place that had started the whole thing.

He'd decided to talk to Connie about it during their next jam session, and she seemed to agree with Pearl and Amethyst that Garnet's behavior wasn't his fault.

"The Gems have never been mad about me asking questions before," he'd told her. "Well, Amethyst sometimes, but even when one of them does get mad it's usually because I asked about something personal."

"Maybe it's something that was personal to Garnet that you couldn't have known about," Connie suggested. "Like how you wouldn't have known ahead of time that the clusters would freak her out. Maybe one of her friends was shattered in the battle or something."

"Still, it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't asked about it," Steven said.

"I'm sure she knows you didn't mean to hurt her or anything," Connie said, gently spreading jam on a biscuit. "She probably just needs a little bit of time to cool down."

"Maybe, but last time she got this upset she split apart!" Steven said, distraught, his own jam snack half-eaten and forgotten on a napkin. "It wasn't until Ruby and Sapphire realized that they were hurting other people that they made up and fused together again."

"Well, you could always try apologizing to her," Connie said. "I don't think it could make things worse, in any case."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Steven said.

"Of course I am, silly," Connie said, shutting the lid of her violin case with a soft click. "Anyway, I've gotta go. My mom's taking me to the optometrist and I still haven't figured out how to explain that I can see perfectly fine without glasses now."

"Okay," Steven said, gathering up the leftover food and his ukulele and stepping onto the temple's warp pad palm with Connie before quickly warping them both to the house proper.

And into the middle of a fight between the Gems.

"I told you not to bring it up yet!" Garnet yelled at Amethyst. "He wasn't supposed to be wondering about this yet, wasn't supposed to know until he was older!"

"What, because we have so much choice as to when he's going to face it?" Amethyst yelled back. "We could be dealing with this tomorrow, for all we know. Isn't it better for him to know sooner?"

"She has a point," Pearl offered, meek. "We don't know when he'll be facing this for real, when we all will be. All the preparation in the world won't help if he doesn't know what he'll be up against."

"But we have more time!" Garnet fumed. "The longer we can keep him safe and focused, the better! What he's learning, he can turn against anything, whether he knows what it is or not!"

"How can you know for sure, though?" Amethyst demanded. "Future vision shows what's possible, or probable, not what's certain! What if it's like when Jasper and Peridot came for us and we weren't prepared, huh? Our skills are transferrable enough, but it wasn't any help. Without Steven—"

"Guys?" Steven spoke up. He hadn't heard the exact words to their discussions before, no more than snippets or the occasional word. He wasn't supposed to be hearing this. He didn't _want_ to be.

"I think I should go. See you, Steven," Connie said, and then she made her way out of the house faster than she'd ever gone before without running. The front door slammed shut behind her, startling everyone out of the frozen state they'd been in since they'd realized Steven had warped in.

"Guys, what's going on?" Steven asked, but no one answered him. Instead, Garnet huffed and stormed over to the temple door, impatiently opened it, and stepped into her room.

Once she'd left, most of the tension seemed to melt out of the air. Steven was ashamed to feel this way, but it felt better in here with her gone.

"Steven, this isn't your fault," Pearl said. "This is between us; it's something we've needed to work out for a while now. We just waited too long, and now Garnet's mad that she didn't have more of a say in it."

"Don't worry, Ste-man," Amethyst said, resting a hand on Steven's shoulder. "We'll work it all out, and Garnet will be back to normal in no time!"

"Probably," Amethyst muttered so quietly Steven could barely hear.

Steven's stomach turned with guilt. They were protecting him again, hiding the truth. He had been the one to get Garnet worried, or mad, or whichever combination of the two she was. No matter what the others said, he could feel that he was to blame.

If only he could know what he'd done wrong.

The Gems had always been open to sharing knowledge, and he'd thought that this time would be no different. Pearl had been willing to answer his questions about Homeworld and Gem stuff even when they were chasing Peridot into the old Gem ships, and they'd never tried to hide any part of his past, his heritage, from him. They'd kept secrets to protect him, but never about things like this. Not that he ever knew about, at least.

So why would they start now?

Amethyst patted his shoulder and then walked off towards the door to the temple, looking over her shoulder to check on Steven and offer him an unconvincing fake grin and a double thumbs-up, which Steven returned as best as he could. There were still tears threatening to leak from the corners of his eyes, but it seemed good enough to fool Amethyst, who opened the door to her room and walked inside.

The door shut behind her and Steven was left in the house with only Pearl, who stood nervously by the kitchen counter, looking ready to burst with nervous energy.

"Pearl?" Steven asked, and the Gem in question started.

"Yes, Steven?" she asked, her voice anxious.

"What _did_ happen to the cracked Gems?"

Pearl became so tense she looked like her whole body would shatter if Steven were to touch her. She seemed to be fighting with herself, inside, struggling to decide whether to answer him or not. She'd always been the one most eager to share knowledge, even when Steven hadn't asked, and it was killing her not to tell him.

"Homeworld . . . collected them," Pearl offered, her voice soft. "The shards, the cracked gems, even whole rebel Gems. They thought they could find uses for them . . . in the cluster experiments and such, mostly. Only the few of us who remained whole and physical at the end of the battle were able to escape in time, hide ourselves to avoid being taken."

Pearl shuddered, clutching one hand to her stomach and the other to her Gem.

"It was so close, a matter of minutes for most of us. If I'd regenerated just two minutes later than I did . . ."

She didn't finish the sentence, but Steven got the idea.

"Then, that means . . ." Steven paused, trying to figure out what it meant, trying to find the words.

"Almost all the rebel Gems were reclaimed by Homeworld," Pearl offered, her voice soft with grief. "Only a very few Gems your mother protected remained. Amethyst was left behind in the Kindergarten, too, because she was made so low to the ground, was so small and late. We were only left on Earth by chance, all of us."

Steven felt himself grow sick, thinking of the clusters, thinking of how the Gems had very nearly been a part of something like that, shattered and broken, almost killed but not quite.

"No wonder Garnet didn't want to tell me," Steven said, his voice small. "I can't believe I brought it up . . ."

"Steven, you didn't know!" Pearl said, startled. "It was an accident! Garnet knows that, we all know you were just curious!"

"But still," Steven said, tears beginning to leak from his eyes. "I brought up something horrible for her, for all of you."

"Oh, Steven," Pearl said, rushing over and catching him in a hug as the tears began to track down his face. "You couldn't have known. We hadn't let you. You had to find out sometime; this wasn't your fault!"

Pearl's reassurances weren't helping, though. Now that Steven knew why Garnet was so upset, he couldn't help but feel worse about the whole thing. Garnet must have lost friends to Homeworld, had probably almost been taken herself. And Steven had made her remember it.

* * *

He'd waited until Pearl and Amethyst were both in their rooms before he went after Garnet. He had to apologize, had to try to make things right, but he knew they would try to stop him, try to make him think it wasn't his fault even though it was.

Hesitantly, he approached the door to the temple. He'd only ever opened the door to his mother's room before, didn't even know if he could open it to another room, but he had to try. He had to find Garnet.

Carefully, he focused on the door, concentrating on opening it _not to Rose's room to Garnet's, I need to go to Garnet's room_.

The door melted open onto a field of soft pink clouds. Steven sighed and went in anyway. It had been a long shot, after all, and the room could help him find Garnet anyway. He hoped.

The door shut behind him, leaving him in the vast, soft expanse of his mother's old room, now his. It was so peaceful in here, so nice that it almost made him want to just lie down in the soft clouds and sleep until he'd forgotten that Garnet was ever mad at him, so long that the Gems had resolved their fight and things could go back to normal.

That wouldn't work, of course. They'd just get worried about him and fight harder. He'd only be making things worse again.

 _Focus, Steven. You have to keep what you want clear._

"Room, I want you to make me a door to wherever Garnet is . . . or wherever Ruby and Sapphire are if Garnet's unfused."

A door was simple enough for the room to make; it had to be. And he'd made it clear enough what he wanted, or he hoped he had.

And the room complied. A simple pink door appeared in midair in front of Steven, with a few puffs of pink clouds around the edges.

Steven grabbed the doorknob and yanked the door open. Before he could begin to doubt himself, he walked through the door to wherever Garnet was.

And there she was, shoulders slumped and a hand pressed to her forehead, sitting on the ground.

They weren't in Garnet's room, or at least, Steven didn't think they were. This flat, rocky plain was too simple to be one of the Gems' rooms. No, it looked more like one of the areas connecting rooms.

"Steven."

Garnet's voice was sharp, hard, surprised. Steven looked back over to her to see her looking at him, visor off and all three eyes focused on his face.

"You shouldn't be here."

"Garnet, I—"

"You shouldn't _be here_ , Steven. Get out of here!"

Garnet stood up, rematerializing her visor, all strictness now. He could see her arms falter as she moved them to cross them over her chest.

"I just wanted to—"

"Steven, not now. We can talk later."

"No!" Steven said. "I don't want this to wait any longer!"

But before Steven could get out the words _I'm sorry_ , Garnet had taken off and was running through the temple.

"Not yet," he could hear her telling herself. "He's not ready yet."

"Garnet!" he called, but she was out of earshot already. He'd have to catch up with her before he could apologize.

* * *

Steven raced through tunnels and jumped along floating pathways, always just too far behind Garnet to catch up, too out of breath to yell out an apology.

He had only wanted to fix things between them. Was what he'd said to Garnet, what he'd asked, really that hurtful? How much had he damaged the bond between them, that she was running from him, wouldn't even let him speak to her?

Steven paused, panting, trying to get his breath. He was in a smooth room with doors and walls for once, and—

Steven had been to this part of the temple, once before. He didn't remember solid details from it, just the twisting red tubes spread outwards from the heart of the temple. One went down, but several sprouted upwards, like the branches of a tree.

And as he watched, a flash of dark pink-purple crawled out of sight along one of the tubes.

When he wasn't carrying a plate with several syrupy waffles precariously perched on it, it was a lot easier to grab hold of one of the tubes and climb.

He was sure he'd seen Garnet run along the tube he'd grabbed hold of, and he lifted himself on top of it to do the same. Running along a sloped surface like this wasn't easy, but he'd done harder things. He was a Crystal Gem. He could do it.

"Garnet!" he called, but if she heard him, she didn't respond.

The tube sloped upwards for maybe ten feet before leveling out and twisting its way through a tunnel with walls and a ceiling but no floor in sight, nothing but blackness and the faint glowing of the tube itself. Steven could hear Garnet's panicking echoing back, though, her nervous cries of "Not yet! Not now!"

"Garnet! Hold on!" he cried. She could probably hear him, but this was no good. Shouting an apology down a dark tunnel wasn't really apologizing, wouldn't make up for what he'd done to her.

The tunnel abruptly began sloping down, and Steven's feet fell out from under him. He began racing down the tube like it was a slide, only there were no sides to the slide and nothing to break his fall if he tipped off.

He screamed as he slid down, but then his feet were hitting solid ground and Garnet was only a few feet in front of him, only the barest flash of her visible, darting into some twisting, mazelike set of tunnels.

"Garnet! Just let me talk to you!" Steven called, but Garnet didn't stop. Instead, Steven followed the glimpses of her he could see through the pathway, hoping she would stop, hoping he could apologize to her and make things right between them.

Steven caught up with Garnet just in time to see a door shut behind her.

It looked like the door that led to the temple, mostly. The only real difference was that this door was set into a dark gray wall that seemed to go on forever in all directions, and that the star symbol surrounding the gems inlaid in the door was turned upside down.

"Steven!" Amethyst called from somewhere behind him. He could have sworn that she hadn't been following him, that no one but him knew what he was doing, but yet here Amethyst was, racing towards him. Pearl followed behind her.

"Steven, stop!" Amethyst yelled. "Garnet just needs time to herself, you've got to stop chasing her! You'll only make it worse!"

Steven froze. That was the last thing he wanted to do. He just wanted all the Gems to be happy and getting along again. He just wanted to fix his mistake.

But there was no way to do that without apologizing.

"I've just got to tell her I'm sorry!" Steven yelled, and before Amethyst or Pearl could reach him, he called on the power in his gem, focused it on the door in front of him.

The rose quartz gem at the bottom glowed, and the door melted open. Behind it, Steven could only see pitch blackness. No sign of Garnet, but this had to be where she was.

"STEVEN!" Amethyst and Pearl called out in unison, but they were still yards away, and this was something he had to do.

Steven stepped through the doorway.


	2. Chapter 1

**And here's chapter one :D**

 **Thanks again to rana2001 for beta reading!**

* * *

The ground was hard under him. Hard and cold, and his whole body was stiff.

Where was he? He could have sworn he'd been on his feet when he'd followed Garnet through the door, but now it felt like he was sitting. What had happened? Had he hit his head and passed out?

Woozily, he lifted his hand and pressed it to his forehead, then ran it through his hair, feeling for bumps or bruises. There were none.

He was noticing, though, that the blackness was not absolute. It was more of a dull reddish pink color, uneven and dulled.

He'd forgotten to open his eyes. Mostly because he hadn't thought they were closed, but still.

He blinked them open, which was more difficult than he thought it would be. His eyes felt caked shut with sleep gunk, like that one time he'd slept until noon but a hundred times worse.

Even after rubbing at his eyes a few times to rid them of the gunk, he still couldn't make sense of what he was seeing.

It wasn't pitch black, for starters, and it didn't look like anywhere in the temple, or even any of the Gem places on Earth he'd seen. If he had to compare it to something, it was closest to Peridot's ship, the one they'd been briefly imprisoned in.

These walls weren't green, though; they were grey, dark and uniform and depressing. They weren't shiny, either, but gritty in a fine way, like the linoleum floor in the Big Donut when Lars forgot to sweep it.

Steven looked over his shoulder and saw a smooth, seamless wall that neatly bent into corners on either side of him. No sign of the door he'd walked through. No sign of Garnet, either.

Was he here all alone?

Before the thought could start to truly terrify him, he heard voices, and familiar ones at that. Amethyst's voice, angry, and Pearl's voice, defeated, and Garnet's voice, sounding so totally sad that Steven wondered for an instant if someone had died, because what else besides being forced to unfuse could make Garnet sound so _lost_ , so _helpless_?

"Guys?" he tried to ask, but his voice was weak and croaky for some reason. He swallowed a couple times, trying to get moisture into his throat, and tried again.

"Guys?"

That time, his voice came out more or less normal, and the Gems fell silent. It only lasted a moment, and then Steven could make out their panicked, frantic whispering.

The longer he listened to them, the more certain he grew of where they were: somewhere to his right, past the short wall defining the nook he was sitting in, close.

Shaky for some reason he wasn't really sure of, Steven pushed himself to his feet and walked around the corner.

He found the Gems right where he expected them, but was still shocked.

The Gems sitting on the floor in front of him were the same ones he'd grown up with, he was pretty sure. Still, there was something different about them, something more than the way they looked (and when had Amethyst's hair been that short, or Pearl been wearing something without even one flowing or decorative element to it?). It was in their faces, in their haunted eyes and slumped shoulders.

And when they saw Steven, they might as well have seen him dead judging by the way their faces grew even sadder, even more hopeless.

"Steven," Pearl said, her voice tiny and small. Garnet wiped a tear out from under her visor with a balled fist and cold fury.

"I told you we should have waited," she said to the other Gems. "None of us were ready for this, Steven least of all."

"Guys, what's going on?" Steven asked. "Where are we? What happened?"

Pearl buried her face in her hands, and from the muffled noises she was making, Steven knew she was crying.

Amethyst tilted her head up to look directly into Steven's eyes, and her own looked utterly exhausted as she patted the ground, indicating he should sit.

Steven sunk to the ground, wincing against the hard, cold surface but glad to be off his feet. His whole body felt oddly sore, like he'd slept wrong on his _everything_. It was starting to wear off, but it did feel a bit better to be sitting.

Steven stretched his legs out in front of him instead of curling them in and felt his oddly pristine flip-flops squelch against the floor. The pose felt too casual for the situation, but he didn't know what the right one was when his legs felt like they'd fall off before curling in close to his body.

With Pearl sobbing into her hands and Garnet as distraught as she could get, the burden of explaining fell to Amethyst, and Steven could tell she was struggling to string the right words together.

"Steven, we, uh, we've kind of been hiding something from you. Something very big, for a very long time . . ."

She trailed off and decided to restart from a different point.

"Homeworld collected the fallen Gems from the battlefield, Steven. The whole ones, the ones shattered beyond repair, rebels and Homeworld soldiers alike. The rebels were enemies and their soldiers had failed them, so for the most part they were treated the same."

"Pearl told me," Steven offered, his voice soft to match Amethyst's. "Well, most of it, anyway." Pearl hadn't told him about the Homeworld soldiers being collected, too, though it kind of made sense now that Amethyst explained losing the battle as failure.

"Well, they thought the Gems could still be useful, even though they'd rebelled or failed to carry out orders." Amethyst swallowed hard.

"They used the shards in experiments, like the cluster experiment, and for . . . well, other things, too. And the whole ones . . ."

Amethyst didn't seem to know where to go, so Steven tried to get her back on track.

"They tried to get them working for Homeworld again?" he offered.

Garnet barked out a laugh that was tinged with sadness.

"Not exactly," Amethyst said. "There's a lot of things we never told you, Steven, because we were waiting for you to be old enough to understand. And one of them is, well . . ."

"Gem tech is powered by Gems," Pearl said. She sounded drained. Sometime while Amethyst had been talking, she'd stopped crying, and now she looked exhausted in every sense of the word. "Once their physical bodies have been, well, 'poofed', Homeworld embeds them in technology and makes them power it."

"Gems like—like you guys?" Steven asked, his voice frantic. The old Gem ship, and the traps and everything, Peridot's ship, all powered by Gems? Gems trapped inside objects, helpless and mindless, like Lapis was supposed to be? "Is that what happened to Lapis?"

"Kind of," Amethyst answered. "That's the closest thing you've ever experienced, anyway.

"Homeworld uses defective or resistant Gems for their energy alone, to power everything on Homeworld, every machine there. They brainwashed all the Gems on the planet to make them think it was okay, to make them think that those who weren't efficient and obedient deserved their punishment," she continued.

"That's what they did to the Gems from the battlefield," Garnet said, her voice cold, attempting to hide her sadness behind her usual calm demeanor.

"Your mother and the others managed to avoid being picked up by Homeworld," Amethyst said. "They made a decoy of Rose's gem so that Homeworld wouldn't go looking for her and they ran.

"They came through the Kindergarten at one point, after I was made, and they took me with them. They'd managed to fool Homeworld well enough, for long enough, that they didn't think anyone from Homeworld would try to find them again."

"And then there was Greg," Pearl said.

"Your mother fell in love with him, Steven," Garnet said. "She loved everything on Earth, but she loved him in a way she'd never seemed to love anything else before."

"And then you came along, and Rose had to give up her physical form," Amethyst almost whispered.

"Her energy couldn't be entirely contained in an organic form, even though you were half-Gem. Some of it had to be released when her physical form dissolved, or you would have been destroyed by it as soon as you came into existence," Garnet said.

"Some of it went back into Rose's gem to stay dormant until you could control it," Pearl said. "Some of it made up you. The rest was dispersed. A handful of Gem places on Earth absorbed some of it, but the rest of it made its way off the planet, and kept traveling out through space until it reached the sensors of a Homeworld ship patrolling the same general area as your solar system."

"After that, they knew there were still Gems on Earth, or at least that there had been. Something had to have happened for Rose's gem to let off that much energy. So they brought the ship to Earth," Amethyst said.

"And . . . and you guys fought them off, right? Like we did with Peridot and Jasper?" Steven's voice sounded so weak, danced and cracked with uncertainty.

"No," Pearl said. "We tried, but it was no use."

"Without your mother's shield, it was hopeless," Garnet said. "We did our best to at least protect you, but they were tracking the energy from your gem."

"Jasper was with them, and a Peridot," Amethyst said. "A couple others, too. We were outmatched."

Outmatched? But . . . they were the Crystal Gems! They'd saved the Earth, fought off Homeworld, how could they be _outmatched_?

"They took us, like they'd taken the others," Pearl said. "Used destabilizers on us and just carried you off."

"And then?" Steven asked. There was no way that was the end of it! They had to have broken free, fought off Homeworld again. Otherwise, how had Steven grown up in Beach City, with all the Gems there?

"Homeworld has interstellar prison ships where they keep the Gems they're done with until they can find another use for them," Amethyst said. "Usually they take them to power Gem tech, but especially after the rebellion, they built up more 'defective' Gems than they could use all at once.

"That's where we are now," Amethyst finished.

Steven tried to wrap his head around what they were telling him, what they wanted him to believe. The Gems, defeated? While he was still a baby? All of them brought to a prison ship? Where they were now?

It didn't make sense. None of it added up! How had he grown up with his dad, if they had supposedly been on this ship the whole time? How had he met Connie, or Sadie and Lars, or even Onion? How had he somehow not noticed, not known?

He pressed a hand against his forehead, trying to reconcile his decade or so of life with what the Gems were telling him, but it was impossible. If he had been here since he was a baby, then what was Beach City and his time in it? A dream?

"But how . . . what . . ."

The words tangled in his mouth, faltered and failed before he could ask anything coherent. Garnet stepped in and answered him anyway.

"Steven, all we have ever wanted for you is your safety and your happiness. We created a simulated version of Beach City for you to grow up in so that you could have a normal childhood."

"But . . . but how?" Steven asked.

"Almost all Gems have a special power, Steven," Pearl explained. "Your mother had healing abilities, Garnet has future vision, and I have the ability to project holograms. Amethyst has the ability to create simulations, similar to your mother's room but allowing for infinitely more detail and control."

"You mean . . . this whole time, everything that's happened, it was all in Amethyst's head?" Steven asked.

"Kind of," Amethyst said, her voice a bit sheepish. "More like a shared mindspace I created and kept on track; a bit like when you went into Malachite's mindscape, maybe. It's hard to explain it, really."

"That's why Amethyst never really had a specialty power in the time you knew her," Pearl explained. "We didn't want you to ask if she was using it on you at any point, and we didn't want to have to lie to you if you did."

"You guys . . . you were lying to me? That whole time!" Steven angrily wiped tears from his face. His whole life, he'd trusted the Gems, thought they trusted him, but they hadn't! They hadn't even trusted him enough to let him know what was really happening to them!

"Steven, we never meant to hurt you," Garnet said, her voice soft and gentle, and she reached a hand out to rest it on his shoulder. He jerked away without thinking, and she pulled her hand back halfway.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "We didn't want it to happen like this, either."

"Steven, we were only trying to protect you!" Pearl said. "This place, it's no place for you! It was no place for you to grow up!"

"We just wanted you to have a chance to live on Earth," Amethyst said. "A chance to be a kid."

"Gems," Garnet said, suddenly serious. "There's a guard on the way."

Pearl and Amethyst went pale and froze, and Steven spoke up in their place.

"What does that mean?" he asked. "What do we do? Do we fight them?"

"No," Garnet said, grim. She reached out to take Steven's hand, and he let her this time. "Steven, I know we've been keeping something very big from you, but you need to trust me right now. We cannot fight the guards here and win, not yet anyway. We have to wait for the right opportunity. I need you to close your eyes and lean back against the wall, and not move, no matter what happens, okay?"

Steven didn't answer her. He was sick of being left out of the loop, and he felt like spiting someone right now. He scowled and looked down at the floor.

"Steven."

Garnet's voice was softer, and she had removed her visor so he could see her eyes. They were pleading with him.

"Just for a minute, Steven. I promise we'll explain everything else after."

Reluctantly, Steven nodded. He scooted himself backwards with his feet until he was pressed against the wall and then closed his eyes.

He could hear footsteps coming closer, clicking against the floor of the ship.

 _Click-clack-click-clack_.

"It's hopeless!" Pearl wailed out of nowhere. "There's no getting out of here, ever!"

Steven's blood froze, and he fought the urge to open his eyes. What was Pearl doing?

"So you understand the situation."

It was an unfamiliar voice, sharp and cold, but with a dangerous smile to it, and Steven shivered involuntarily.

"Guard Spinel," Garnet said in recognition, the way she'd say Steven's name when he walked in sometimes, but quieter, softer.

"Prisoners," Spinel sneered. "I can understand your hopelessness; it's only rational, after all! But I'm afraid you're going to have to keep your whining and wailing in your heads from now on. If you get too loud again, I might just send you out in the next shipment out of spite."

"Understood," Garnet said. Spinel made a noise of disdain, and then Steven could feel her eyes on him. There was no way to explain it, but he could _feel_ her gaze sweeping his form. He struggled not to squirm under her scrutiny.

"Still dragging that sorry excuse for a Gem around?" Spinel asked. "I knew the rebels' loyalty to Rose was extreme, but this is taking it a bit far, don't you think?" Her tone turned patronizing, as if the Gems were children who had grown overly attached to a rotting stick instead of Steven.

Steven could hear her chuckling as she turned around and walked away again.

 _Click-clack-click-clack-fading-fading-silence_.

"It's okay now, Steven," Pearl said. "You can open your eyes."

He did, easing his eyes open slowly.

"That was Spinel," Garnet said. "She's one of the guards on the ship."

"You know her?" Steven asked.

"Yeah," Amethyst said. "There aren't a lot of guards on the ship, and they don't rotate them off the ship too much, so you get to know them."

"Spinel is one of the more powerful guards, but she tends to give those who respect her authority an easier time," Pearl explained. "She was coming to see what the noise was about, so I told her what she wanted to hear."

"If there's not many guards, then why haven't you guys broken out of here yet?" Steven asked.

Amethyst sighed.

"It's not that simple," Pearl said. "There aren't many guards compared to the size of the ship or the number of Gems being kept on it, but those who are here are powerful and ruthless. They don't hesitate to crack Gems for even tiny infractions, and they'll swarm any Gems giving serious trouble. If all the prisoners fought back together, they might be able to defeat the guards, but most aren't willing or able to, and the three of us against even half of the guards would have little to no chance of survival, let alone escape."

"Not to mention that the ship's in the middle of nowhere," Amethyst said. "We're not near anything, really, not even a dead planet, much less a planet like Earth. Even if we could get out of the ship, we'd have no place to go and no way to get there either."

Steven's eyes were starting to well up with tears, and Garnet reached over and gently wiped them away.

"I'm so sorry, Steven," she said. "When you asked about the gem shard, my future vision would hardly show any possible future except this one, and I panicked. We all should have been more honest with you, and I never should have tried to shut you out, even to protect you."

"S'okay," Steven said. He wasn't nearly as mad at them anymore. They had just been trying to protect him again, trying to keep him safe. And as reluctant as he was to admit it, he might have actually needed it this time.

"If you want," Amethyst said. "I could put you back in the simulation. I could even make it so this was all a dream, so you wouldn't remember what's going on."

There was nothing Steven wanted more than to go back to Beach City, to go back to the life he'd had before, and here Amethyst was, offering it to him.

But he thought of Spinel, and a chill raced down his spine. The Gems had been facing the guards and getting to know the prison for years now, while he'd been useless, more useless than he'd felt even when he failed missions. He was older now, and could use the powers in his Gem (he thought, anyway). He didn't want to run away like a scared little kid. If he could help them, he was going to.

"No," he said. "I want to remember this. I want to be able to help you guys find a way out of here."

"Oh, Steven," Pearl said, clutching her hands to her chest.

Before he knew what was happening, Amethyst was wrapping him in a hug. Then Pearl's arms locked vice-like around the two of them, and finally Garnet's arms wrapped around them all.

"We'll get out of here and back to Earth," Steven said. "And we'll do it together."


End file.
